“Credits first!” the Purveyor leader belched over the radio.

“Relax,” Rogers said. “I’ll let them know not to get too ahead of themselves.”

Reaching forward, he keyed in the frequency for the Garliali representative.

“Listen up,” he said. “You can route the funds through the computer on my ship. I’ll remove any traces from the credits so they can’t be, uh, traced, and then I’ll route them to the Purveyors. When it’s halfway done, you can start picking up the cargo. Got it?”

“Got it, Rogers,” the female said. “You’re a good man.”

Rogers had been called a lot of things in his life, but a “good man” wasn’t one of them. If the two groups he was tricking were anything but notorious criminal organizations, he might have felt a little bit bad about it. Mostly, though, he was one careless sneeze away from peeing in his pants in fear.

His digital interface changed as he was notified that the credits were incoming. With a couple swift button presses and an authentication code, the money started flowing.

“That’s kind of strange,” Dorsey said. “Why are they sending us the money?” He made some trim adjustments on the control panel and checked his instruments, fiddling with buttons. Some of the nervousness had already come back—Rogers could see him sitting more stiffly.

“It’s complicated,” Rogers said. “Lots of, um, really technical finance stuff about money laundering and all that. Just pilot the damn ship and make sure we don’t run into the cargo after we release it, alright?”

The “technical finance stuff” was a spoofing program that would funnel all the credits into Rogers’ account. The Purveyors would be receiving empty data packets, but if the finance tech he’d known from his military days had programmed this correctly, they wouldn’t know about it until he was relaxing on a beach on Dathum under an assumed name.

A quiet moment passed as the sequence started working. Rogers saw a lot of code running from his command console—he even understood most of it—and his heart felt like it was trying to climb up his throat and out his nose. Just one over-observant Purveyor, and people would start shooting.

“There’s the credits,” the Purveyors squawked over the radio. “You’re a good man, Rogers.”

A good man, twice in one day? Something about that made his skin crawl a bit.

Rogers smirked to himself as the transfer reached fifty percent completion. Now all he had to do was unlock the cargo magnets to release the crate, sit back, and collect the best kind of money there was—someone else’s. He flipped the switch to disengage the cargo and watched the open, empty space through the window.

“Beautiful,” Rogers said. “Just beautiful. See? I told you this would be easy.”

The tugboat’s mandibles cinched around the crate and began its flight back to the Garliali escort, and Rogers reached for a bottle of Jasker 120, the finest Scotch in the system. Now was a time for celebration.

A beep came from his instrument panel, which he promptly ignored just like he did most beeps that came from his instrument panel. This was not a time for beeps.